Movie Review – Tender Mercies

Tender Mercies (1983)
Written by Horton Foote
Directed by Bruce Beresford

Tender Mercies will break your heart, but that’s a good thing. It’s a film that is incredibly sensitive & thoughtful. It’s the story of an alcoholic, not during the midst of a bender or at their most self-destructive. Instead, this is a drunk who has lost everything that had any value. His career, his money, his wife, his daughter. He can’t get them back, but he can try and build something new. It’s a film whose presentation is simple, much like the quiet life lived in its desolate setting. It asks us how we can keep living when so much tragedy falls into our laps, some of it our fault and some of it happenstance. 

Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) wakes up in a run-down West Texas motel/gas station. He’s a country music singer whose life has fallen apart due to alcohol. Without a desire to return to his old ways, Mac asks the owner, Nora Lee (Tess Harper), if he can stick around and help with repairs and upkeep. She’s happy to have someone around as a single mom to Sonny. Her husband was killed in Vietnam, and so she’s been without company for a long time. 

Mac can’t run away from his life for too long, and eventually, he has to speak with his ex-wife, Dixie (Betty Buckley), who has become a country star in her own right. Their 18-year-old daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), plans to elope with her boyfriend, and Mac tries to give fatherly advice while reeling from the damage he did to the people he was supposed to love & care for. This isn’t a story where our protagonist gets a happy ending but merely realizes he has to keep going even if the bad things that happen in life aren’t always in his control.

Tender Mercies feels like a country music song brought to life. It possesses those sensibilities of a soul adrift, aching over the beautiful things lost while believing they have to find a reason to live. Duvall has to be restrained here. As a result, the character calls for a performance where the actor is not letting his full range of emotions out. He’s carrying the weight of male expectations in rural America, and that means you don’t cry, not even in front of the people you love. Mac’s pain is palpable; he’s holding back because he doesn’t know what to do if he lets it all out. It’s similar but different from Duvall’s remarkable performance in The Apostle. In fact, these two would make a fantastic double feature to spotlight the actor doing some of his best work.

Duvall has a heartbreaking moment near the end where he finally expresses how confused he is by everything to Nora Lee: “I don’t know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, marry me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny’s daddy died in the war, [spoiler hidden], Why? See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.” Nora can’t really argue with Mac in this. He will be happy, but he just can’t trust it completely; he has to live believing this will be taken from him in time, so cherish it while you have it and be ready to move on when needed. 

The script isn’t attempting to deliver big answers to the audience. Instead, it wants to provoke thought in the audience. Horton Foote, who adapted Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the film where Duvall made his feature debut, certainly has a talent for mining the soul and sharing what he finds in such a touching manner. Foote understands how people are expected to be things, and failing to live up to those expectations can devastate their lives. Mac knows what people expect from him. A woman at the grocery store thinks she recognizes him and says, “Didn’t you used to be Mac Sledge?” which feels like the perfect way to phrase that. He used to be the country music star people know, and he isn’t that anymore. Neither is he a father or husband when we meet him. Through Nora Lee and Sonny, he tries to become those things again, but when the film closes, he is still uncertain if he will do it well. He didn’t the first time around.

There are no big revelations here, just life being lived and wrestling with what we should do with it all. It’s clear to me that this film means a lot to Duvall, as I can see it informing many of his performances afterward. He also wrote and composed most of the songs he sings in the picture, showing deeper dedication than most actors take with a film. The film won Duvall his only Oscar, which I don’t expect will be repeated as he is 92 years old. It’s a role given to another actor that might have felt rather generic and uninspired. In Duvall’s hands, it becomes something exceptional, a presentation of masculinity that shows how what we expect from men, to hold back their emotions, can cripple them in tragic ways.